google documents

I have a large stack of novels to go through since finishing the Dante Club. I finished Skin by Ted Dekker, but I honestly don’t feel like reviewing it right now. I’m now in the middle of House by Dekker and Frank Peretti. Yes, I know it’s been out forever, but I’m not much of a horror person. I could probably finish it this evening if I wanted to. We’ll see.

I’ve been writing a bit. The novel has now reached almost 16,000 words. Not bad for about six months of writing on and off. It would probably go much faster if I wasn’t so easily bogged down in research. I like my science to be as accurate as I can make it, and that pretty much smashes the brakes on a sci-fi novel. Currently I am trying to understand the basics of genetic manipulation and some chemistry along with how nuclear fusion would work if we managed to actually create it. Some of it is integral to the story. Some of it just matters to me because I’m a nerd.

Note to other would-be authors: Google Documents is a great tool for jotting down random ideas. Instead of emailing things to myself, I just log in, type, and hit “Save.” When I’ve accumulated quite a few paragraphs, I copy it into the Word document for my book. The one thing I don’t like is the formatting is off when I import the text as a Word file, but it could just be my own ineptitude.

Randy Ingermanson runs it. Look him up on Amazon to see some of the novels he’s written. He’s a physicist with a Ph.D. from Berkeley. Yeah, that Berkeley. He’s also very funny and a Christian. I highly recommend it.